Quotations
about Animal RightsAsk
the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is:
"Because the animals are like us." Ask the experimenters why it is
morally okay to experiment on animals, and the answer is: "Because
the animals are not like us." Animal experimentation rests on a
logical contradiction.
~ Charles R. Magel
God loved the
birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented
cages.
~ Jacques Deval, Afin de vivre bel et
bien
We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and
have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond
doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the
Devil in human form.
~ William Ralph Inge, Outspoken Essays,
1922
From beasts we scorn as soulless,
In forest, field and
den,
The cry goes up to witness
The soullessness of men.
~ M.
Frida Hartley
The question is not, "Can they reason?"
nor, "Can they talk?" but rather, "Can they suffer?"
~ Jeremy Bentham
I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat
are not the better for it.
~ Abraham Lincoln
Personally, I
would not give a fig for any man's religion whose horse, cat and dog do
not feel its benefits. Life in any form is our perpetual
responsibility.
~ S. Parkes
Cadman
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Link: The
Meatrix
No one in the world needs a mink coat but a
mink.
~ Author Unknown
Never wear anything that panics the
cat.
~ P.J. O'Rourke
Cruelty is one fashion statement we
can all do without.
~ Rue McClanahan
Ever occur to you why
some of us can be this much concerned with animals suffering?
Because government is not. Why not? Animals don't vote.
~ Paul Harvey
Support your right to arm bears.
~ Cleveland
Amory (Thank you, Leslie.)
Why should man expect
his prayer for mercy to be heard by What is above him when he shows no
mercy to what is under him?
~ Pierre Troubetzkoy
Think occasionally of the suffering of
which you spare yourself the sight.
~ Albert
Schweitzer
Hunting is not a sport. In a sport,
both sides should know they're in the game.
~ Paul
Rodriguez
Featured Link: People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals
Man is the only creature that consumes
without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he
is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch
rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.
~ George Orwell, Animal Farm
Cockfighting was illegal in Oklahoma until
1963, when a judge ruled that chickens are not animals and therefore
unprotected by anticruelty laws.
~ U.S. News & World
Report, 6 December 1999
Animals give me more pleasure
through the viewfinder of a camera than they ever did in the crosshairs of
a gunsight. And after I've finished "shooting," my unharmed victims
are still around for others to enjoy. I have developed a deep
respect for animals. I consider them fellow living creatures with
certain rights that should not be violated any more than those of
humans.
~ Jimmy Stewart
If we cut up beasts simply because
they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the
struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals,
enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.
~ C.S.
Lewis
Michael W. Fox, vice-president of the Humane Society,
said that, "to call an animal with whom you share your life a 'pet,' is
reminiscent of men's magazines where you (a figure of speech, don't take
it personally) have the Pet of the Month." It is supposed that the
continued use of the word "pet" to designate dogs or cats threatens to
reduce their level of respect to the current status of twentieth century
North American women. Now that's radical.
~ The McGill Red
Herring
People are more violently opposed to fur than
leather because it's safer to harass rich women than motorcycle
gangs.
~ Author Unknown
Though boys throw stones at frogs
in sport, the frogs do not die in sport, but in earnest.
~ Bion,
"Water and Land Animals," Plutarch
The squirrel that you kill in
jest, dies in earnest.
~ Henry David Thoreau
Drinking
without being thirsty and making love at any time, Madame, are the only
things that distinguish us from other animals.
~ Pierre-Augustin
Caron de Beaumarchais, The Marriage of Figaro, 1784, translated
I ask people why they have deer
heads on their walls. They always say because it's such a beautiful
animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive, but I
have photographs of her.
~ Ellen DeGeneres
When a man
wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal. When
he destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman.
~ Joseph
Wood Krutch
The fascination of shooting as a sport depends
almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of a gun.
~ P.G. Wodehouse
If you love animals called pets,
why do you eat animals called dinner?
~ As seen on a shirt
The
fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual
superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do
wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that
cannot.
~ Mark Twain, What Is Man,
1906
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Games
Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the
only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow-creatures is amusing
in itself.
~ James Anthony Froude, Oceana,
1886
The animals of the world exist for their own
reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people
were made for white, or women created for men.
~ Alice
Walker
As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of
animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behavior
toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man
could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme
racist theories, the principle that might is right.
~ Isaac Bashevis
Singer
Life is life - whether in a cat, or dog or man. There is no difference there between a cat or a man. The idea of
difference is a human conception for man's own advantage.
~ Sri Aurobindo
When I was twelve, I went hunting with my father and
we shot a bird. He was laying there and something struck me. Why do we call this fun to kill this creature [who] was as happy as I was
when I woke up this morning.
~ Marv Levy
Those who wish to
pet and baby wild animals "love" them. But those who respect their
natures and wish to let them live normal lives, love them more.
~ Edwin Way Teale, Circle of the Seasons, 1953
It is just
like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is
dumb to his dull perceptions.
~ Mark Twain
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The woods were made for the
hunters of dreams,
The brooks for the fishers of song;
To the
hunters who hunt for the gunless game
The streams and the woods
belong.
~ Sam Walter Foss
Animals can communicate
quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are
ignored.
~ Alice Walker
In an earlier stage of our
development most human groups held to a tribal ethic. Members of the
tribe were protected, but people of other tribes could be robbed or killed
as one pleased. Gradually the circle of protection expanded, but as
recently as 150 years ago we did not include blacks. So African
human beings could be captured, shipped to America and sold. In
Australia white settlers regarded Aborigines as a pest and hunted them
down, much as kangaroos are hunted down today. Just as we have
progressed beyond the blatantly racist ethic of the era of slavery and
colonialism, so we must now progress beyond the speciesist ethic of the
era of factory farming, of the use of animals as mere research tools, of
whaling, seal hunting, kangaroo slaughter and the destruction of
wilderness. We must take the final step in expanding the circle of
ethics.
~ Pete Singer
Get a feel for fur: Slam your
fingers in a car door.
~ Anonymous, on the use of steel traps to
capture fur-bearing animals, cited in Audubon, November
1990
Dogs are getting bigger, according to a leading dog
manufacturer.
~ Leo Rosten
Whether hunting is right or
wrong, a spiritual experience, or an outlet for the killer instinct, one
thing it is not is a sport. Sport is when individuals or
teams compete against each other under equal circumstances to
determine who is better at a given game or endeavor. Hunting will be
a sport when deer, elk, bears, and ducks are... given 12-gauge
shotguns. Bet we'd see a lot fewer drunk yahoos (live ones, anyway)
in the woods if that happened.
~ R. Lerner, letter, Sierra, March-April 1991
Heaven is by favor; if it were
by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. Of all the
creatures ever made [man] is the most detestable. Of the entire
brood, he is the only one... that possesses malice. He is the only
creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain.
~ Mark
Twain
Evolutionary biology is now uttering and seeking those
forces that link us with all those that have being. If we can
discover the meaning in the trilling of a frog, perhaps we may understand
why it is for us not merely noise but a song of poetry and emotion.
~ Adrian Forsyth, A Natural History of Sex,
1986
Featured Link: EPA
Testing Programs
Vivisection is a social evil because if it
advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human
character.
~ George Bernard Shaw
I am not interested to
know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human
race or doesn't.... The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals
is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient
justification of the enmity without looking further.
~ Mark
Twain
The basis of all animal rights should be the Golden
Rule: we should treat them as we would wish them to treat us, were
any other species in our dominant position.
~ Christine
Stevens
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport;
when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
~ George
Bernard Shaw
The animal shall not be measured by
man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move
finished and complete, gifted with extension of the senses we have lost or
never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not
brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with
ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor
and travail of the earth.
~ Henry Beston, The Outermost House,
1928
I abhor vivisection with my whole soul. All the
scientific discoveries stained with innocent blood I count as of no
consequence.
~ Mahatma Gandhi
I abhor vivisection.
It should at least be curbed. Better, it should be abolished.
I know of no achievement through vivisection, no scientific discovery,
that could not have been obtained without such barbarism and
cruelty. The whole thing is evil.
~ Charles Mayo, founder of
the Mayo Clinic
I had bought two male chimps from a primate
colony in Holland. They lived next to each other in separate cages
for several months before I used one as a [heart] donor. When we put
him to sleep in his cage in preparation for the operation, he chattered
and cried incessantly. We attached no significance to this, but it
must have made a great impression on his companion, for when we removed
the body to the operating room, the other chimp wept bitterly and was
inconsolable for days. The incident made a deep impression on
me. I vowed never again to experiment with such sensitive
creatures.
~ Christian Barnard, surgeon
Terms like that,
"Humane Society," are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care
to dwell on what happens to the innocent.
~ Barbara Kingsolver, Animal
Dreams
I think animal testing is a terrible idea; they
get all nervous and give the wrong answers.
~ Author
Unknown
Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as
valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar.
~ Bradley
Millar
A Robin Redbreast in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a
Rage.
~ William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
If a
ferret bites you it is nearly always your own fault.
~ Phil
Drabble
The human spirit is not dead. It lives on in
secret.... It has come to believe that compassion, in which all ethics
must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces
all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.
~ Albert
Schweitzer, Novel Peace Prize address, "The Problem of Peace in the World
Today"
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Hunt each other - leave the
animals alone.
~ As seen on a shirt
People must have renounced, it seems to
me, all natural intelligence to dare to advance that animals are but
animated machines.... It appears to me, besides, that [such people] can
never have observed with attention the character of animals, not to have
distinguished among them the different voices of need, of suffering, of
joy, of pain, of love, of anger, and of all their affections. It
would be very strange that they should express so well what they could not
feel.
~ Voltaire, Trate sur la tolerance
Zoos are
becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once were in
their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were
pursued, we would need no zoos at all.
~ Michael Fox, Sierra,
November-December 1990
The sort of man who likes to spend his
time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its
tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental
weakness should be combated at the public expense, and not
fostered.
~ H.L. Mencken, quoted in New York Evening Mail, 2
February 1918
The assumption that animals are without rights
and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a
positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity.
Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
~ Schopenhauer
Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which
is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living
beings, we are still savages.
~ Thomas A. Edison
To a man
whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the
sufferings of animals than in the sufferings of man. For with the
latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who
causes it is a criminal. But thousands of animals are uselessly
butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any man were to
refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And that is the
unpardonable crime.
~ Romain Rolland, Nobel Prize
1915
Featured Link: Animal Concerns
Community
When it comes to having a central nervous system,
and the ability to feel pain, hunger, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog
is a boy.
~ Ingrid Newkirk
Very little of the great
cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct.
Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots
of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the
time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness
will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that
this time may come.
~ Albert Schweitzer
Deer hunting would
be fine sport, if only the deer had guns.
~ William S. Gilbert
There is no fundamental difference between
man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.... The difference in
mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one
of degree and not of kind. The love for all living creatures is the
most noble attribute of man. We have seen that the senses and
intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory,
attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may
be found in an incipient, or even sometimes a well-developed condition, in
the lower animals.
~ Charles Darwin
Because the heart
beats under a covering of hair, of fur, feathers, or wings, it is, for
that reason, to be of no account?
~ Jean Paul Richter
God
made all the creatures and gave them our love and our fear,
To give
sign, we and they are His children, one family here.
~ Robert Browning
Deliberate cruelty to our
defenseless and
beautiful little cousins is surely one of the meanest and most detestable
vices of which a human being can be guilty.
~ William Ralph Inge
Featured Link: Last Chance for
Animals
The indifference, callousness and contempt that so
many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in
great suffering in animals, and second because it results in an
incalculably great impoverishment of the human spirit. All education
should be directed toward the refinement of the individual's sensibilities
in relation not only to one's fellow humans everywhere, but to all things
whatsoever. In the societies of the Western world compassionate
intelligence is encouraged in girls - in boys it is taboo. The taboo
on tenderness in which boys are conditioned, the emphasis on "manliness,"
"machismo," plays havoc with the male's capacity for compassionate
intelligence. Tenderness is considered to be feminine, and that is
sufficient to remove it from the repertoire of masculine behavior.
Indeed, things have reached such a pass in the Western world that many men
seem to have lost all understanding of its meaning. The masculine
world would substitute for it the idea of "justice." The difficulty
with that is that there is not much compassion in their justice, and
justice without compassion is not justice at all.
~ Ashley
Montague
Wear your own skin.
~ As seen on a shirt
They
are slaves who fear to speak
For the helpless and the weak.
~ James
Russell Lowell
There will be no justice as long as
man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker
than he is.
~ Isaac Bashevis Singer
Every year tens of
thousands of animals suffer and die in laboratory tests of cosmetics and
household products... despite the fact that the test results do not help
prevent or treat accidental or purposeful misuse of the products.
Please join me in using your voice for those whose cries are forever
sealed behind the laboratory doors.
~ Woody Harrelson
Man
is not the lord of all the world's animals. He is the
protector.
~ John Forsythe
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The life spark in my eyes is
in no way different than the life spark in the eyes of any other sentient
being.
~ Michael Stepaniak, quoted in Joanne Stepaniak, The Vegan
Sourcebook, 1998
This tendency [to cruelty] should be
watched in them [children], and if they incline to any such cruelty, they
should be taught the contrary usage. For the custom of tormenting
and killing other animals will, by degrees, harden their hearts even
towards men.... And they, who delight in the suffering and
destruction of inferior creatures, will not be apt to be very
compassionate or benign to those of their own kind. Children should
from the beginning be brought up in an abhorrence of killing or tormenting
living beings.... And indeed, I think people from their cradles
should be tender to all sensible creatures.... All the entertainment
and talk of History is of nothing but fighting and killing; and the honour
and renown that is bestowed on conquerors, who, for the most part, are but
the great butchers of mankind, further mislead youth.
~ John
Locke
Beyond domestic animals and our response to their fealty
and affection, we have a peculiar charge concerning the wild animals which
supply our clothes, food and adornments.
~ S. Parkes
Cadman
We must fight against the spirit of
unconscious cruelty with which we treat the animals. Animals suffer
as much as we do. True humanity does not allow us to impose such
sufferings on them. It is our duty to make the whole world recognize
it. Until we extend our circle of compassion to all living things,
humanity will not find peace.
~ Albert Schweitzer, The Philosophy
of Civilization
If you have men who will exclude any of
God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men
who will deal likewise with their fellow men.
~ St. Francis of Assisi
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